[patrick451]

> It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. It's hard to admit, I know.

It's really not. It was obvious to me about 9 months in that my advisor really didn't know all that much. The professors who really seemed to have technical chops were either new faculty still trying to get tenure, or the rare iconoclast who didn't play the game and had a single grad student. The tenured professors with large research labs were frankly better politicians than they were scientists.